15 February 2017
After my first call with Ann, I sat down to write a letter to her. In part I thought this might fill in my own history a bit, give some context for her imagination. I thought it interesting that during my conversation with her, Ann seemed to assume I was unfamiliar with her work. She asked me, half way in, what was my program of study. Rhetoric and Composition, I said. Her response: Oh good. I thought maybe you were in Education or something or god forbid Literature. I chuckled. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she said, and then added that some fields seemed to “cater to their merchants of learning…which aren’t ours.”
Also I wanted to ask her questions—questions that need to be asked of a woman of her age and experience—far beyond the confines of her scholarship. Some days later I received a letter in return. I had assumed, given her failing eye sight, that Ann would have people read things for her and that she would dictate when she wanted to write back. But Ann penned the return letter herself! (Can’t tell you how satisfying it is to receive beautifully handwritten snail mail!) The brief letter relays her intent to respond to my longer one with more details at a later date; those who help her write are employed with ongoing projects. It will be some time, she warns, before she can provide a full response to my letter.
As I’ve been working on my exam reading, crafting an argument for the place of Montessori in the consideration of digital writing pedagogies, I’ve been thinking about the “Gender Remixer” example I detailed to Ann during my last phone conversation. While the example sufficed in communicating the general idea I have in mind in terms of a digital “equivalent” to a Montessorian “didactic material” for teaching, it had nothing to do directly with writing. The perfect content for crafting such a teaching material for teaching writing, it seemed to me, requires a return to Forming, Thinking, Writing (FTW), Berthoff’s first textbook. (By the way, she was very clear about the first edition…the blue one…being better than the second…the red one.)
I’ve written about FTW in other places on this blog (and in conference papers), detailing my appreciation of its focus on invention, what makes it so perfect a resource for crafting digital pedagogical experiences that imagine uses of the digital beyond “the text.” Because FTW aims “to make accessible to you your own powers of language” (how Ann puts it in our phone conversation), it aims to bring a writer’s conscious attention to the powers of thinking and imagination that feed what we write. In our conversation, she identified FTW’s “most important contribution” the fact that it exists “in the service of learning and process.” And that’s exactly what I want to do… craft digital experiences “in the service of [the] learning and process” of composing, particularly for first year writing.
I opened our phone call telling Ann a story.
THE STORY Last year I watched the National Spelling Bee. Admittedly it was my first time. Fascinating to watch, actually, particularly when paying attention to how students mediate the process of recalling spellings from memory, or the process of working out guesses. Some young people divert their eyes with a look away that seems like looking in. Others mime printing or handwriting the word on their palms, sometimes voicing the spelling after miming each letter, sometimes voicing simultaneously with writing. But what was amazing to me… Some contestants mimed the spellings of words on a qwerty keyboard. And even more amazing still… Some seemed to mime the spelling of the words on a smart phone keyboard, using one finger or two thumbs, as though texting to God. [Someone has studied this, right? I mean… Really, how fascinating! Also I couldn’t help but notice the prevalence of girls miming spellings instead of boys… Someday I’ll seek out that scholarship.] When did texting become ubiquitous in our culture…2007 or so? How quickly and thoroughly the muscle memory specific to smart phone technology is showing up as a part of young people’s literacy practices. At any rate, the moment really speaks to me in terms of the role of media in the “learning and process” aspects of literacy.
I wanted to know her thoughts about how quickly our bodies and our minds are conforming to contemporary media and what her ideas might be in terms of the implications of this on writing philosophy and pedagogy. Ann led me back to Reclaiming the Imagination. Take the XXX example, for instance, she said. How process and muscle memory…the juxtaposition of the visual and the kinetic…I can’t think without being able to see…
Sometimes when she gets going there are moments I don’t understand a word, usually a name, but I don’t dare stop her to clarify. I’m in awe of the way Ann’s mind works, reaching back through time, against age, imagining forward, even in a different kind of age, one speeding up so fast it’s difficult for the youngest among us to keep up.
I’m not sure which author she was referencing there at the “XXX”. Could’ve been Gregory (though it sounded like “kudai”) from Reclaiming. And sometimes she loses her train of thought. Here that happened, but I understood where she’d gone and the value in going there… Into the sandbox from our last phone call.
Ann defines the essence of her work: “To get the person not to write the sentence as the beginning.”
Yes. Here is my idea, I begin. Take, for instance, the Gombrich Ping/Pong exercise in Forming, Thinking, Writing. Okay, she says. I continue, Let’s say that before any “lesson” is given involving the text, students are invited to experience a material, We’ll call it the Ping/Pong exercise. Students experience a simple screen. At the top are the words “Ping” and “Pong,” separated into two columns. To the left is a sidebar containing six pairs of words and/or images and or sounds, the “like” things described in FTW. Okay, she says. Students are invited to click, drag and drop the pairs into the columns, essentially assigning each thing to “ping” or “pong.” When we meet in class, then, we look at each other’s classifications and discuss. And this is where the role of the teacher as guide comes in. Yes, she says, because it’s really about the way our mouths form the sounds, and the feelings of those sounds, where the tongue hits in the mouth, the meanings and associations that we bring to those feelings.
Ann tells me about a discussion she had about this with someone who speaks a different language. In that language, you know, different sounds accompany the same objects, but the sounds themselves lead people to categorize the objects differently.
The material could be used to highlight many different things about the way we associate sounds with objects, memories, understandings; it’s the teacher’s job to guide the discussion into realms defined by course goals and learning outcomes.
Well, Ann says she thinks I’m on to something and she wants to keep fielding my inquiries, which I love.
***Here’s another note. Recalling Palmeri’s Remixing Composition… His discussion of Berthoff’s work as anchored in the understanding that “the mental process of composing [is] a profoundly multimodal activity” is right on. But I don’t think he gives quite enough credit to the teachers in her life, and her own experiences, when he claims that “Berthoff drew much of her belief about the multimodality of the mind from such humanistic thinkers as Coleridge, Langer, and Cassirer.” Certainly she did. But every time I speak with her she mentions elementary school teachers, high school teachers, teachers she knows, her friends, people with whom she’s clearly had deeply satisfying conversations about human development and education and literacy. Plus, she’s a mother. From my own perspective as a mother of a small child (mine is 4 years old and a Montessori child) I can tell you we tend to pay attention, particularly as literacy scholars. Palmeri notes Berthoff’s suggestion in The Making of Meaning that “‘all candidates for the PhD in rhetoric be required to teach third grade for a year.'” He ascribes this as “perhaps hyperbolic.” Actually… I’m not so sure.
Next time, I think I’ll ask her.
Images:
- Irish Typepad. “Christmas Letter.” 2011. Flickr creative commons.
- David Kutschke. “%DEX=S. ” 2014. Flicker creative commons.
- Crazybananas. “Motherhood: Don’t let go.” 2009. Flicker creative commons.
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